Here’s the complete creation.

The crates in the center open up, and although I didn’t get a good shot, he’s got them set up like Japanese micro-hotels.

Top view of the aft. That’s Leia working on de-carbonizing Han Solo.

Rear view. No clue what the troll has to do with the rest of the Star Wars theme, but he’s the one who raises and lowers the wingflaps.

The Master considers further changes… or maybe just building something completely different.

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1. What He Makes With the Legos — Habitat
2. What He Makes With the Legos — Starship
3. What He Makes With The Legos — Samurai Mask

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Enter Larhken.

I found her by doing an internet search. Of course. She’s relatively low-profile. Naturally; the history of persecution of folks who fly in the face of the AAO or similar institutions is pretty astonishing. Unless, of course, you’re familiar with, say midwifery and ACOG, in which case it’s no surprise at all. The Mediarchy’s monopoly is rather like, say, the Mafia’s. But I digress.

I scheduled a visit to her home. I brought all my glasses and contacts and about fifteen gazillion questions. Her place, up in the hills, was quirky and cool and I felt instantly like I was home.

I know it sounds goofily cliche, but being in her office, I was waiting for her to hand me a red pill and a blue pill. She had that kind of reserve that “off the path” folks have until they know whether you’re serious or not. We chatted about my vision, my thoughts about vision correction, and about what I’m noticing about my own path.

Our culture firmly believes, and teaches, that eyes do not heal, that vision gets worse and worse and needs greater and greater correction. So when you start observing otherwise, you question yourself. The neat thing about a coach is that instead of running around the inside of your own head asking “Am I insane? Am I insane?”, you can ask someone else.

I described for Larhken what I was noticing. The fact that when I wore my glasses, I could feel my facial muscles tense unpleasantly. That the more I wore them, the more my shoulders and neck tensed up and jutted forward, and the more likely it seemed that my spine would go out of alignment. Most unsettling, though, I noticed a pronounced difference in my emotional state. It was as if the vision correction was creating a tension that affected my entire body, and made me far less patient, snappier, more abrupt and hard-edged, and that as soon as I did any kind of vision relaxation exercises (breathing, blinking, palming, sunning), my whole mental state shifted along with the muscles.

It’s not uncommon, it turns out. Plenty of people have just normalized it (just like people normalize things like cradle cap and seasonal allergies, rather than considering changes in diet). And since our culture does not encourage you to question these things (you MUST have thoroughly corrected vision! Must!), I honestly am beginning to think that a lot of the stressed-out crazy folks out there really just need to rethink their vision correction.

I think another reason that a lot of people aren’t interested in engaging with their own vision correction is that a huge component of what you see is psychological rather than physical. Your eyes are not GIGO; quite a lot of brain is devoted to visual processing by way of the visual cortex, and quite a few related structures. So if you’re trying to root out what’s up with your sight, a lot of times the path winds through some rocky emotional territory. As was the case with me; my myopia set in during a very rough year of my life. My brain said “you need some protection from what’s out there; let’s pull in a bit.” And then because I was wearing that correction all the time, my brain never moved on from that state. And, it never got the protection it needed/wanted, which is where the snappishness and harshness comes from; it’s fight or flight, on a very low level.

Larhken did a bunch of exercises with me that highlighted exactly what my own vision issues are, besides the whole emotional thing. I am strongly right-dominant, and my eyes don’t work equally. While doing the exercises, I could actually feel my left eye snapping around trying to catch up. Totally weird, but very affirming.

…and when I went to put my glasses back on, to leave, I felt like throwing up. Which is also, apparently, common. Your brain and your body get to a comfortable place, and then you throw too much correction at them, it affects your vestibular system. Neat! So Larhken gave me a referral to “a friendly opthamologist”. I’d never met such a creature, but was excited about it.

And that’s another post.

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Kaia scares strangers, because she looks all feral and wolfy, despite the fact that she’s an elderly marshmallow with fur, and pretty much incapable of aggression to humans. In her nearly 14 years of life, I’ve only ever heard her growl at a person three times. She just doesn’t have it in her.

Aurora is not the least bit intimidated. Big dogs don’t bother her. She thinks Fang, the bull mastiff down the dock, is fabulous. Big? No problem. Little dogs are another story entirely. Miniature poodles, wiener dogs, anything smaller than her, is cause for complete shrieking terror.

I have no idea why.

So when we went to Santa Barbara, I was slightly worried about my friend’s small dog, Chloe. She’s gorgeous and friendly and fluffy and all things delightful in a small dog. You would think that would be OK with Aurora. But not so much. The first two days of our visit were shrieking terror every time the dog got let in. Laura didn’t want to terrorize Aurora, so she was mostly keeping her out, but I didn’t want to torture the dog, so I kept wanting her in. Every time, the shriek, the clinging to the leg. “Mama! Dog! DOOOOOOOG!!!!!!!” and I’d tell her it was OK, I’d pet Chloe right in front of her, let her know it was no big deal. She remained unconvinced.

Until, y’know, we stopped making a deal out of it. I came out of the kitchen to see this:

And now? Now, we are not afraid.

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This is sort of a double gutpunch. I just posted about freaking out about Aurora growing up, and this just makes it that much bigger. *All* the babies are growing up.

It also is a reminder that I have got to stay in contact with Haleema’s family. In the years to come, I think that having a milk sibling will matter to them. I think it’s important for the kids to have that as a point of contact, not so much because they need contact, but because they need context. Having a milk sibling is part of the culture of nurture I’ve talked about before. Even as it was happening, Kestrel recognized how important it was that he share “his” milk with another baby. That’s the sharing of food in the most profound way possible, from someone so little.

I’m still hugely grateful for the opportunity to have shared something so important. And it’s an honor to be able to keep tabs on her life. Thanks, D & T.

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Mostly I don’t get nostalgic. Maybe it’s that I have enough not-so-nice memories of times past that I’d rather poke holes in myself with a pickle fork than go back in time. Or maybe it’s that I am plenty happy in the present. Maybe both. In any case, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking wistfully about the past. Except recently.

Dan, Lucy, and Grace were all born in the spring. Mike and I sometimes jokingly refer to the time between March 26 and April 21 as lambing season. Dan just turned fourteen and on Wednesday Grace will move into double digits: she’ll be ten. In a few more weeks, Lucy will turn twelve. During the last couple of days I have been remembering their births; well, more accurately, I’ve been remembering our labors. And remembering labor has got me remembering our midwife’s presence and support during the labors of all three kids.

Here’s what I remember:

For those of you who don’t know, there’s this stage in labor when women get really angry or short-tempered. In fact, one of the ways you can read where a woman is in her labor — how close she is to birthing — is by taking notice of her emotional state. In any case, when Dan and I were laboring together during his birth, I hit the grumpy stage. And I remember looking over at our midwife, who was sitting by my bed, leaning forward, very very still. I remember thinking, “What the BLEEP is she doing? Why isn’t she helping me?” And then I had this realization that she was helping. She was listening to me. I mean, she was listening to me so deeply — to my body, to the sounds of my labor, to my feelings. She was absolutely, without reservation, tuned in. And that, I realized, was exactly the help I needed. I could labor on my own with that kind of attunement to sustain me. That realization was so powerful. To be listened to in that way was an extraordinary gift.

When I was pregnant with Lucy, Mike and I asked Dan what we should name the new baby. He thought about it for a while and said with great conviction, “Spoon Cake!” We laughed and asked him why and he said, “Because that baby’s going to come out of your tummy like cake on a spoon!” We laughed some more, but the odd thing was that he was right. Lucy’s birth was hard work, but towards the end of the labor things got very quiet and very calm and very smooth (especially after the midwife kicked the nasty, loud nurse out of the room). I remember this moment when I turned to Pam and said, “I think I”m going to push now.” Pam, who was sitting by my bed again said quietly (and I think she was laughing a little), “Okay.” And I did. She let me lead and she trusted me to know when the time was right. There was nothing forced in her treatment of me, nothing pressured, no sense of hurry…just an exceptionally mindful presence beside and with me. And that presence was an extraordinary gift.

Grace’s labor was the hardest. Not surprisingly, if you know Grace, she was all cattywumpus in there — facing backward and just generally bucking tradition. That labor seemed to go on and on and on; while labors with Dan and Lucy were hard work, there was no denying that Grace’s was painful. At some point, Pam turned to Mike and me and asked us what we wanted to do. I was pretty out of it, but I thought at the time that she was asking us if we wanted intervention. Mike and I had talked a lot over the years about wanting to do things naturally, about my desire to have joyful labors rather than fear- and pain-filled ones. We’d talked about how, if I got into trouble, the question would come. We knew that if the baby or I were really in trouble, we’d be able to tell by the way the question was posed to us (or whether a question was posed at all). So, we just kept going the way we had been, with the hard work and the pain. And Pam stayed with us. She respected our choice and supported us when, I know, lots of other medical professionals wouldn’t have. Grace was born in her caul (a sign of spiritual significance, of good luck, and often, legend would have it, a sign of future greatness). Only one in a thousand babies are born in their cauls (mostly premature babies) and often doctors puncture the caul before the baby is born. Pam didn’t. And I remember — rather dimly from my exhausted fog — listening to her talk with Mike about what it might mean that Grace was born in hers. Pam stayed with us when we made the choice to take the hard road on principle rather than the easy one for expediency’s sake. She respected my right to make choices about my body and my life. Moreover, she was peaceful and calm during a difficult time and willing to let Grace come into the world within the protective membrane of her caul without trying to fix or correct what was, I really think, meant to be.

I hate watching movies and tv shows that include scenes of women giving birth. I think they’re so bogus, so stereotyped; they play so coldly into the hands of interventionist (sexist and patriarchal) western medical traditions. I am feeling nostalgic for my babies and, while I have no desire to have more of them, I’m remembering with great fondness and with a deep sense of wonderment, our labors and the deep matter you really can learn from midwives. There are ways of being with and for others in the world that I think I wouldn’t be able to conceive of were it not for Pam. I think I learned the power of attunement, of deep listening from her. I think I learned to trust the instincts of my friends, my loved ones, and my students and to be willing to follow when the time is right. And I think I learned that not everything that is happening needs to be controlled or fixed. Sometimes people need to choose the harder way and when they do, I want to go with them as friend and ally rather than trying to make things easier.

Today and for the next month at least, I’ve decided, I’m celebrating midwives and the amazing, empowering work they do for women who choose labors liberated from the lies and excesses of western medicine, who treasure the right to choose when, where, and how our bodies will be treated, and who hope for labors and births that are spiritually enriching experiences and not merely clinical ones. We haven’t seen Pam for almost 10 years, and yet we remember very, very well and, I really think, somewhere in their bones, Dan, Lucy, and Grace remember too.

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I was sitting on the stern of my boat, chatting with two of my neighbors from another dock, when the two little girls (9 and 11, I think) who live part-time in the boat just across from us, and two little boys (10 and 12) who live here full-time, walked up the dock, and around the corner to get into the girls’ boat to play. Rowan saw them, and hopped off our boat to ask if he could play too.

The oldest boy put his hand on Rowan’s chest, and said quite clearly, “Not now. Maybe some other time.”

I watched my son crumple. He turned around, walked the few steps back to our boat trying hard not to let the other kids see his face, and made it just back to our boat before the sobs erupted. My neighbors both visibly cringed, and Rowan dissolved into my arms, sobbing with his whole body.

His first experience with intentional cruelty.

Now, my instinct was to walk over there and throw the kid in the water. Not a neighborly move. I sat very still while I tried to calm down, and asked my neighbors what they thought. They were pretty much as upset as I was; they both know and like my son. And as (un)luck would have it, the twelve year old’s mother walked down the dock not ten minutes later, wanting to rant about what a terrible day she’d had. I mentioned to her what had happened, and she left.

I got busy taking care of Rowan at that point. But a few minutes later, the twelve year old was at my boat. I came out. He said “Sorry” in the most perfunctory, sullen tone you could imagine. I proceeded to ask if he knew what he was apologizing for, and he proceeded to rewrite history. It was a great story, but it had nothing whatsoever to do with what I’d seen happen. I stopped him. “I was sitting right there. Our two neighbors were too. Don’t try to spin a story, because it won’t work. How about you just own up to what you did?” He literally balled his fists up at his side, shot me a hateful look. I said “Do you have something to say to me?”, he snarled “NO!” and took off back down the dock.

Five minutes later, his mother is back at my boat, screaming at me, because he’s only twelve, he’s only a boy, I had no right to yell at him (?!?), etc etc. More revisionist history from the boy, I’m assuming. Anyway, we talked, and I realized where the problem came from, because the mother was utterly incapable of coming up with a solution to the problem, that in the future would not result in my child being crushed. I finally crashlanded the conversation, and she wandered off. Heartsick, I went back to the front of our boat, where my son was literally huddling with his fingers in his ears trying not to hear the other kids playing on the boat just across the dock.

When Jason got home from work, we talked about it. He congratulated me on not throwing the kid in the water, and wondered where I found my willpower. We discussed strategies going forward. I went and talked to one of the neighbors who’d been there for a reality check. She was still disgusted, so at least I knew it wasn’t all me being unreasonable Mama Bear.

As serendipity would have it, the following morning, I ran into the father of the two girls. I know it sounds kind of odd that I didn’t go to his boat, but there’s a certain politic that says that you don’t go attack someone else in their boat. It’s kind of weird and intrusive. If you find someone out on the dock, that’s more neutral territory, and people 100% of the time react better than when you bring a fight right to their home.

I told him what had happened, and he physically cringed. He confirmed that he’d known nothing whatsoever of what had been done, that it had all come from the twelve year old. I asked him for a clarification of his boat rules, and he told me that his girls love playing with my kids, and that in fact, just to help smooth things over, why didn’t they play today?

And friends, today was glorious. The girls came to our boat, and many movies were watched, many games of tag were played, much watermelon was devoured. And maybe it’s the difference between preteen girls and preteen boys, but Aurora was absolutely included in the play, with the two older girls very conscientiously putting her PFD on whenever the game was going to move up onto the deck.

I saw the two boys when I went up to the washhouse to do a load of laundry. They were playing some game that involved trying to hit each other as hard as possible. I let out a cheery “Hello” that, oddly enough, was returned. I decided to head out onto a limb, and offered that they could come play too, if they’d like. They both got quite interested in their toes, and said that they had chores to do. Which was sad; I think it would have gone a long way towards teaching them about kindness and inclusivity had they been allowed to come play. But apparently doing laundry was more important.

While I had hoped that Rowan would be more insulated from that kind of cliquishness and cruelty by being homeschooled, it’s turned out that it happened at the perfect time. One of the discussions we had while sitting out on the boat hiding from the world was about a time another little boy, who’s just a bit younger than Rowan, was playing with us, and Rowan made him cry, and did not understand what he’d done. Now? He gets it. And feels awful about it.

Sometimes, you must experience a thing before you can generate genuine empathy for a thing. As my pal Angela put it, Rowan has now been inoculated against cruelty. He’ll think twice about how he acts, from the memory of the pain inflicted on him. I am hoping that it was a strong enough dose that it will carry him forward as a better person in the world, more apt to look out for, and take care with, the feelings of others, especially those smaller than him.

And while Rowan is only eight and can’t yet wrap his head around some of the more complicated nuances here, he’s also making a start in thinking about why someone would behave that way, which is the root of compassion. I couldn’t be more delighted, and it’s kind of making up for the horrible ache of watching my child get hurt and not being able to stop it in time because I truly did not see it coming.

But if it ever happens again, expect some splashing. I’m not that enlightened.

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